OVERLOOKED…

Telemanagement and occupational health: What are the effects of being distant and uninformed about real work?
Cécile Clergeau and Laetitia Pihel

This research explores the cases of two firms that have implemented telemanagement. Focalized mainly on formally controlling activities, this form of management creates distortions between managers’ and wage-earners’ conceptions. Since wage-earners experience much uncertainty during periods of change that make demands on human resource management, these distortions foster stress, despair and a loss of confidence and of commitment. This can strongly affect employees’ health.

Research or wasted time? Toward incorporating administrative tasks in the occupation of research professor
Aubépine Dahan and Vincent Mangematin

Using the case of faculty members who feel increasingly overwhelmed by everyday, administrative chores at their university, questions are raised about occupations that are burdened with more and more requirements related to the “organizational form”. Managing and running an organization take ever more time to the detriment of actually doing one’s job. However, being busy with such chores is a sign of autonomy for professionals who, otherwise, would face the threat of becoming “knowledge workers” inside organizations run by a “purely” administrative personnel. Based on twenty interviews with faculty members in charge of administrative tasks, this study has detected an implicit awareness that these tasks, though lacking in legitimacy, are a source of power. Three approaches are explored that allow for legitimating career trajectories that include an investment in the strategic tasks of managing the organization.

 
The renaissance of the Fiat 500: Out of the pipeline onto the bottom line
Jean-Marc Pointet

Fiat 500 is a sales phenomenon to which the automaker is very much indebted for its recovery. What are the reasons for this success? What lessons to draw for marketing? Although the car-concept Tre Più Uno, designed like the 500, met with enormous success in the media in March 2004, why did Fiat’s executives not imagine designing a new 500? The idea of resuscitating the car coincided with a restructuring of top management. Beyond the feelings aroused by the 500’s design, Fiat’s strategy appeals to a “marketing of the authentic” and a “tribal marketing”. This case study deciphers the underpinnings of this automobile’s success. Chosen as “Car of the year 2008”, it symbolized a revolution in Fiat.

 
From a customer-oriented strategy to “mystery customer surveys” at the SNCF: A fiction with quite real effects!
Damien Collard

Questions are raised about the customer-oriented strategy adopted by the SNCF’s head office and its implementation since the first years of this new millennium. What effects have the “mystery customer surveys” — a program for placing passengers at the center of the organization — had on personnel in front offices and on middle management? This program purposed to change and homogenize employees’ occupational practices and skills so as to improve the service provided to passengers. As recent research conducted in a train station’s stopover service in a French town has shown, these surveys tend to hide the complexity of the work performed by employees during contacts with customers and to standardize their relations with passengers. Light is shed on the role and latent effects of these surveys in the reorganization of France’s national railway company.

 
Culture as a social construction: The case of a mutualist hospital group
Jennifer Urasadettan

Most studies on cultural integration are oriented toward providing evidence of the existence of common values that, because they are shared, make the organization coherent and facilitate organized actions. Juxtaposed with this dominant current of thought are studies that, turned toward the ambiguous or even contentious dimensions of culture, focus on subcultures. By moving beyond the dichotomy between a cultural integration based on sharing values (the organization as a source of coherence) or on power relations (the organization as a place of incoherence and conflict), an approach is proposed to study culture as the result of partial, negotiated agreements (thus including both of the foregoing). Studying culture as a social construction requires understanding the personnel’s strategies of action that lead to collective operations. Since these strategies cannot be separated from the perception of the local context, it is also necessary to take into account the complexity of the organization and its context as they are seen by the personnel. This view of the social construction of a company culture is illustrated through a case study of a health-care group made up of six clinics. The five of these clinics that had been purchased, though bound by the same mutualist code, have problems operating as a mutualist organization.

Redesigning coordination between farmers and dairy cooperatives: Toward a joint management of the seasonal milk supply
Martine Napoleone and Eduardo Chia

Labels of quality attesting a product’s origin are now a trend in dairy products. They draw attention to both the place of origin and the agricultural practices whereby certain goods are distinguished from products for mass consumption. This modifies relations between farmers and food-processors; and calls for rethinking the arrangements and rules that enable these two parties to coordinate activities for producing a common good. How to foster the design and management of this common good? To favor the emergence of joint actions in a small cooperative that makes products using goat milk, the authors used an approach whereby the parties involved could work out a joint understanding of the situation. It was based on joint efforts and on intermediate “objects” based on factual elements. This type of approach seems relevant and transposable to the drafting of other joint projects (based on the chain of production or on a territory) involving farmers with other parties.

TRIAL BY FACT

The unforeseen appearance of a new development strategy: The hare’s revenge on the tortoise
Éric Huber

In a big French defense firm, a team was forced to realize a major technical project in a two-year period, instead of the four initially foreseen. It made shortcuts in usual procedures (the “V cycle” used as a standard in the defense industry) and invented others that very much resemble the agile methods being diffused in the sector of information and communications technology. Given the urgency of advancing the project, most persons in the firm — unaware of the subtleties of development cycles — did not perceive this innovation or else saw it as an organizational failure. Nonetheless, this new, audacious strategy met with success. It is worthwhile analyzing and reproducing it.

OTHER TIMES, OTHER PLACES

 
A difficult agreement on “values” in an African firm
Serge Alain Godong

Americans from AES, after its acquisition of a majority holding in the Société Nationale d’Électricité du Cameroun, heavily insisted on “values” during meetings with wage-earners in the utility company. This signaled a new era with the goal of thoroughly transforming individual and collective behaviors. But the persons for whom this reform was intended were not prepared to hear the message…

MOSAICS
 

Thierry Weil: Can we learn from experience? On James March’s The ambiguities of experience (Cornell University Press, 2010).

Julie Bastianuti: Which standards for firms? On the special issue of Entreprises et histoire (edited by Blanche Segrestin, n° 57, 2009).

Philippe Silberzahn: Reforming the health system: The innovator’s prescription — On Clayton Christensen, Jérôme Grossman and Jason Hwang’s La prescription de l’innovateur.